Translating the Literatures of
Small European Nations
Clifton Hill House, University of Bristol
September 8th to 10th 2015
An international conference funded by the Arts & Humanities
Research Council
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Introduction
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Bristol for our conference, Translating the Literatures of
Small European Nations. This event forms the centrepiece of a two-year project, funded by the
Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Translating Cultures theme, which explores
how European literatures written in less well-known languages or from less familiar traditions
and dependent on translation seek to reach the wider world.
Since launching our project in September 2014, we have held workshops at the Bath Royal
Literary and Scientific Institution, in conjunction with the leading independent bookshop, Mr B’s
Emporium of Reading Delights, and at the British Library, in conjunction with European
Literature Night 2015. Through our conversations with the wide range of professionals who
work as advocates for these literatures, we aim to reach a better understanding of what our
advisory board member, Sarah Death, has called the ‘choreography’ of translating a text from a
smaller European literature. We will publish our findings in an on-line report in 2016.
Alongside this practical examination of the process, our conference aims to explore how far
these literatures might constitute a distinct literary system in their interaction with the outside
world, whether perceived ‘big’ literatures or other ‘small’ literatures. From the beginning, we
have structured our conference as a comparative exercise, where case studies taken from a wide
range of literatures are explored in juxtaposition. A key aim of our project is that academics and
other intermediaries should step outside their normal linguistic, geographical or professional
territory and reflect on their subject and work in a broader context. We hope that this approach
will help both overcome notions of national literary exceptionality and uniqueness and challenge
and enrich prevailing world literary theories that, in our view, serve smaller national literatures
inadequately. We will invite some of you to develop your papers into chapters in an edited
volume that addresses these questions.
We warmly acknowledge the generous support and engagement of the AHRC, without which
this conference and project would not be happening. We would also like, above all, to thank
Hannah Blackman in the School of Modern Languages for her tireless efforts to organise
participants’ travel and her ready advice on many other matters. We are also very grateful for the
support and guidance of other colleagues in the School, and in the University of Bristol
Conference Office, Faculty of Arts Finance Office, Bristol Institute for Research in the
Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA) and Research and Enterprise Development (RED). We are
delighted that we are able to hold our conference in the wonderful locations of Clifton Hill
House and Goldney Hall and appreciate all the efforts of staff there.
Finally, our thanks to you for coming to share your work; we hope very much that you find the
conference inspiring and enjoyable. Please don’t hesitate to approach us with any questions!
Rajendra Chitnis
Senior Lecturer, Czech, Russian & Slovak
University of Bristol
Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
Senior Lecturer, Scandinavian Studies
University College London
Rhian Atkin
Lecturer, Portuguese & Lusophone
University of Cardiff
Zoran Milutinović
Professor, South Slav Literature & Theory
SSEES, University College London
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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
All panels will take place in the Wills Reception Room, Clifton Hill House.
Wednesday September 9th
9:30-11am
Panel One: Theoretical Approaches
Chair: Zoran Milutinović (School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College
London)
Discussant: Ian Giles (Edinburgh)
Marko Juvan (University of Ljubljana): World Literature, Translation, and a Small Literature
Josianne Mamo (University of Glasgow): On Claiming a Language: Critical Reflections on the
Creative Process
Ondřej Vimr (independent scholar, Prague): Fighting non-translation: Does it make sense?
Individual and institutional strategies of promulgating less translated literatures
11-11:30am
Coffee Break
11:30-1pm
Panel Two: Reaching the Market
Chair: Orsolya Réthelyi (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
Discussant: Giulia Trentacosti (Edinburgh Napier University)
Paulina Drewniak (University of Wrocław): Translation and transmediality, or on Polish
monsters abroad
Olivia Hellewell (University of Nottingham): A Small but Powerful Machine: Key Actors in the
Slovene Literary Translation Market
Richard Mansell (University of Exeter): How does a Catalan literary translation get to market?
1pm-2pm
Lunch, Dining Room, Clifton Hill House
2pm-3:30pm Panel Three: Poetry in Translation
Chair: Rajendra Chitnis (University of Bristol)
Discussant: Nichola Smalley (University College London)
Ivana Hostová (University of Prešov): But Can the Voices Be Heard? On the English
Translations of Slovak Poetry
Rosa Mucignat, Stephen Watts (King’s College London): Poetry in Translation: News from an
Archive
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Paschalis Nikolaou (Ionian University): By Way of Cavafy?: From the Edges of the Greek World
to Universal Resonance
3:30-4pm
Coffee Break
4-5:30pm
Panel Four: Exporting Literature
Chair: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (UCL)
Discussants: Anikó Szilágyi (Glasgow) and Irvin Wolters (UCL)
Şule Demirkol Ertürk (Yeditepe University, Istanbul): Retranslating from a Peripheral Language:
The Role of Publishers in Recontextualizing and Legitimating Literary Translations
Gunilla Hermansson, Yvonne Leffler (University of Gothenburg): Gender, Genre and Nations:
Swedish Women Writers on Export in the Nineteenth Century
Uroš Tomić (University of Belgrade) Milan Miljković (Institute for Literature and Arts,
Belgrade): It's a Small World After All! – Reading Serbian Culture in Translation: A Case Study
7pm
Speakers’ dinner, Avon Gorge Hotel
Thursday September 10th
9-11am
Panel Five: Forms of Self-Translation
Chair: Carol O’Sullivan (University of Bristol)
Discussant: Jennifer Arnold (University of Birmingham)
Olga Castro (University of Aston): Literary Self-Translation from Galician into Spanish: Cultural
Appropriation or Political Activism?
Anne O’Connor (National University of Ireland, Galway): Competing Voices: Translation,
Nationalism and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century
Jozefina Komporaly (De Montfort University): Self-translation as Cultural Encounter: Migration
and Border Politics – The Case of Matéi Visniec
Liz Wren-Owens (University of Cardiff): 'Antonio Tabucchi: Co-opting Italian texts to the
Anglophone canon'
11-11:30am
Coffee Break
11:30am-1pm Panel Six: Canon Formation and Cultural Stereotyping
Chair: Rhian Atkin (University of Cardiff)
Discussant: Ellen Kythor (University College London)
David Norris (University of Nottingham): Translation, Cultural Exchange, Hospitality:
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Naming the Literatures of Small European Nations
Ursula Phillips (SSEES, UCL): Polish and European: How can translations modify standard
perceptions of Polish culture?
Antonija Primorac (University of Split): “But you do misery so well!”: Cultural Stereotypes,
Translation Politics and Croatian Literature in English
1-2pm
Closing remarks and lunch, Dining Room, Clifton Hill House.
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Abstracts and Speaker Details
Panel One
Marko Juvan: ‘World Literature, Translation, and a Small Literature’
Compared to original production, literary translations are traditionally regarded of lesser
importance, although it is through translating that the representative works of world literature
have been introduced into national literary systems. Translation is constitutive of world literature,
while the presumed universality of world literature is always already inscribed in particular literary
systems through different variants and perspectives articulated predominantly by translations.
Because of its position within the asymmetries of the world systems of economy, languages, and
literatures, literary translation is not only the main mode of transnational literary circulation, but
also the relay for the global spread of Western geo-culture and the hegemony of its aesthetic
discourse. The possibility of a particular literary text written in a “small” language to gain access
to the global literary circulation depends, among other factors, on the fact whether the work in
question has been translated in a global language and where and when it has been published.
This will be demonstrated by the history of “worlding” the Slovenian romantic “national poet”
France Prešeren.
Marko Juvan, MAE, is a literary theorist and comparatist, head of the Institute of Slovenian Literature and
Literary Studies at ZRC SAZU Research Center (Ljubljana), and professor of Slovenian literature at the
University of Ljubljana. He is author of History and Poetics of Intertextuality (2008) and Literary
Studies in Reconstruction (2011).
Josianne Mamo: ‘On Claiming a Language: Critical Reflections on the Creative Process’
Extensive critical attention has been paid to self-translation as an act of rewriting a text from a
source language to a target language. But is that all it means? Through an investigation of
different understandings of ‘self-translation’, this paper will work towards a definition that moves
away from lexical equivalence to cultural transposition. Situating the discussion in the
multilingual reality of Europe, this research provides a unique perspective on Maltese literature
through its discussion of Alfred Sant’s The Iscariot Field / l-Għalqa ta’ l-Iskarjota. The paper uses
an interdisciplinary approach to literary analysis by drawing on postcolonial, cultural and
translation studies and notions such as the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt) and the indigenization of
language (Zabus), as well as the author’s own creative practice as an English-language writer
from Malta, thereby engaging with both the practice and the theory of multilingual writing.
Josianne Mamo is a doctoral researcher and graduate teaching assistant in English Literature (Creative Writing)
at the University of Glasgow. Her current research incorporates both a creative component - a novel set in post-war
Malta – and a critical element exploring the linguistic, political and cultural stratifications of self-translation.
Ondřej Vimr: ‘Fighting non-translation: Does it make sense? Individual and institutional
strategies of promulgating less translated literatures’
The overwhelming part of texts and utterances never gets translated. It makes sense to study the
phenomenon of non-translation in at least two contexts: 1) when it gets artificially induced (such
as in the case of censorship), 2) when it is struggled against. The paper will focus on the latter
case. It will explore past and current, individual and institutional strategies for promulgating less
translated literatures in Europe and analyse who, why and how makes – or tries to make – such
interventions and – as far as the data permit – with what result. It will try to find an answer to
whether it makes sense to undertake such interventions.
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Ondřej Vimr deals with the sociology and history of translation, with a major focus on less translated literatures.
He has taught translation history, theory, criticism and practice in both Uppsala and Prague. His book A
Translator’s History was published in 2013. He has also translated a number of works from Norwegian and
Swedish into Czech.
Panel Two
Paulina Drewniak: ‘Translation and transmediality, or on Polish monsters abroad’
When a short fantasy story Wiedźmin (“The Witcher”) appeared in the Polish Fantastyka magazine
in 1986, no one expected it to become one of the most widely translated Polish texts of the
following decades. But it did. A smashing hit in Poland, the story of the witcher Geralt evolved
into a seven book long saga, was adapted into film, comics, a hit videogame, and eventually
formed a huge transmedial franchise. The paper traces the translational history of the franchise,
comparing Polish-English fantasy translations to the presence of the genre in other parts of the
world (Taiwan, France, Sweden) in order to show how fan cultures can create separate channels,
transcending traditionally established literary systems.
Paulina Drewniak is a doctoral researcher at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Her doctoral project examines
the English translations of the “Witcher” series by the Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski, in the broader
context of national reimagining, modern media and gaming culture, and cultural translation. She has also
published on legal issues of copyright and the problems of translating historiography.
Olivia Hellewell: ‘A Small but Powerful Machine: Key Actors in the Slovene Literary
Translation Market’
In 2008 and 2010, of all EU member states, Slovene publishing houses not only received the
most funding for literary translation overall, but also translated the highest number of literary
works of all institutions in the EU. This paper will assess the material role that institutions and
funds play in supporting the selection and publication of translations from Slovene into English
since 2004. It seeks to gain a clear picture of the mechanics of the institutions that select, support
and publish translations from Slovene into English, and to establish precisely who we might
consider to be the key actors in this process. Data from the Slovene Book Agency (JAK), the
EU-funded Cultural Contact Point Slovenia and individual publishing houses is synthesised in
order to establish firstly, how many literary works have been translated from Slovene into
English since 2004, and most importantly, where they were published and how they were
funded. Having established this overview of key actors, the paper will draw some preliminary
conclusions as to how key actors influence the output of literary translations from Slovene into
English, and to what extent we might consider this to be a conscious shaping of a contemporary
Slovene cultural identity.
Olivia Hellewell is an ESRC-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham. Her current project
explores translation and cultural capital in the context of Slovenia. She is also a published translator.
Richard Mansell: ‘How does a Catalan literary translation get to market?’
This paper will analyse the numerous incentives that are available to encourage translation from
one of Europe’s stateless languages, Catalan, and how these incentives are welcomed and used
by English-language publishers. The study will begin with a survey of the incentives and tools
that are made available by the publicly-funded Institut Ramon Llull. Secondly, it will analyse the
number of translations from Catalan that have been published thanks to these schemes (both
into English and other languages), and those that have appeared without such funding; it will
also consider the pattern of the recipients of the funding. Thirdly, I shall also interview members
of the Institut Ramon Llull, publishers of translations and translators themselves in their role as
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activists for the foreign literature about how well these initiatives work and their future plans.
The study will conclude by determining how past practice informs the likely success of the
various routes to market, both funded and unfunded.
Richard Mansell is Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Exeter, where he directs the MA in
Translation and researches translators’ decision-making processes and how texts are received in translation,
focusing particularly on Catalan-speaking territories. As well as extensive work as a translator of institutional
and cultural documents from Spanish and Catalan, he has translated work from Catalan poets such as Blai
Bonet and Miquel Costa i Llobera, and collaborated on two successful translations and productions of
Shakespeare into Catalan.
Panel Three
Ivana Hostová: ‘But Can the Voices Be Heard? On the English Translations of Slovak
Poetry’
The paper investigates the sociological and cultural agents that have shaped the situation
concerning translation of Slovak poetry into English since 1989. Since poetry is a highly
marginalised discourse in both the source and (potential) target cultures, the situation in its
translation is even more specific. Although it is true that, as Venuti argues, the marginal position
of poetry on the literary market helps it escape the process of commodification to a certain
degree, the extent to which power relationships influence its distribution, reception and
translation is appreciable. The aim of the research is to link the corpus of the existing translations
from the period under scrutiny to the wider sociocultural context through the analysis of the
agents involved in the process of translation.
Ivana Hostová is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Faculty of Arts,
University of Prešov, Slovakia. Her research focuses on contemporary Slovak poetry and poetry in translation.
Following the on-line publication of her dissertation on Slovak and Czech translations of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, in
2014 she published Between Entropy and Vision (Medzi entropiou a víziou), a selection of her work to
date on Slovak poetry.
Rosa Mucignat, Cristina Viti and Stephen Watts: ‘Poetry in Translation: News from an
Archive’
Why is it so hard for writers in lesser used languages to see their works translated into English?
And what factors influence the likelihood of literature from small nations to gain access to a
global readership through English? This joint paper will investigate the dissemination of the
literature of smaller nations and peripheral regions of Europe, focusing in particular on Englishlanguage translations of poetry. We will present preliminary results for the analysis of a unique
database compiled by English poet and translator Stephen Watts, which collects bibliographical
data for poetic translations published in English between 1900 and 2015. This archive is an
invaluable source of information on what international poetry has entered the horizon of English
readers in the last century. Specifically, we will present findings on (a) how the influx of literary
translations correlates with changes in world politics and (b) whether any pattern can be
discerned in the formal and thematic features of poetry in translation.
Rosa Mucignat is a lecturer in comparative literature at King’s College London. Her research interests include the
novel in nineteenth-century Europe, literary geography, the idea of space in narrative, the Romantic myth of Italy
and modern Italian literature. She is the author of Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795–1869 (2013).
Stephen Watts is a poet, translator and editor. His own work has been translated into several other languages,
and he has also published extensively as a translator or co-translator.
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Paschalis Nikolaou: ‘By Way of Cavafy?: From the Edges of the Hellenic World to
Global Resonance’
Cavafy’s poetry has been (re-)translated at a rate unheard of for a modern poet; there is now a
‘globalised’ Cavafy rather than one simply associated with a language of ‘lesser diffusion’. This
paper considers the poet’s diasporic circumstances, along with his activity in terms of selfpromotion and encouraging of translations during his lifetime, as well as the role of figures like
E. M. Forster and T.S. Eliot. At the same time, many poets, in Greece and abroad, keep writing
‘in the manner of Cavafy’. This paper evaluates the dissemination of Cavafy’s work, and to what
extent aspects of this paradigm can be repeated with other poetic voices in peripheral literatures.
At the same time, a bilingual edition of ‘Cavafy-inspired’ poems between 1916 and 2015 will be
discussed; published by Bristol’s Shearsman Books, 12 Greek Poets after Cavafy is a further episode
in the poet’s reception in English.
Paschalis Nikolaou is currently a lecturer at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. He has written articles on
several aspects of translation studies and especially on the relationship between literary translation and creative
writing. With Maria-Venetia Kyritsi he co-edited Translating Selves: Experience and Identity Between
Languages and Literatures (2008) and, with Richard Berengarten, the Selected Poems of Nasos Vayenas
(2010). He is reviews editor of the translation journal mTm.
Panel Four
Şule Demirkol-Ertürk: ‘Retranslating from a Peripheral Language: The Role of
Publishers in Recontextualizing and Legitimating Literary Translations’
This paper examines the circulation and reception processes of two English translations of a
seminal Turkish novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) namely Saatleri Ayarlama
Enstitüsü/ Time Regulation Institute. It explores the dissimilarities between the presentation and
reception processes of these two versions as a case that illustrates (i) the struggle between big
publishing houses and small publishers specialized in translations from specific peripheral
languages and (ii) the role played by the publishers, translators and reviewers in the process of
legitimating literary products where the symbolic capital is transferred from the former to the
latter.
Şule Demirkol-Ertürk is assistant professor of Translation Studies at Yeditepe University, Istanbul. Her
research interests include translation of urban narratives, the transfer of cultural images through translation, and
Turkish literature in translation. She has published articles in English, French and Turkish on the role of
literary translation in the creation and circulation of the images of the city of Istanbul. She is also an active
translator of literary and scholarly texts from English and French into Turkish.
Gunilla Hermansson, Yvonne Leffler: ‘Gender, Genre and Nations: Swedish Women
Writers on Export in the Nineteenth Century’
This paper will focus on three of the factors that determined the successful transnational
dissemination of small literatures in the nineteenth century – genre, gender and nation – and
examines two contrasting cases: the romantic poet, Julia Nyberg (pseud. Euphrosyne), and the
bestselling novelist Emilie Flygare-Carlén. Although there is little evidence of Nyberg’s work
being translated, we will show some examples of the almost ghostlike transnational
dissemination of her work. By contrast, Flygare-Carlén immediately became a major international
bestseller writer, not least in Eastern Europe. Through her, we will demonstrate the complex
pattern of transnational reception in nineteenth century Europe, and illustrate how her novels
were marketed in different countries and how certain differences relate to nation, gender and
genre. We will conclude by discussing the increased interest in Swedish literature in the
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nineteenth century in Europe and America and thereby interrogate the validity of the notion of
‘centre and periphery’ in this period.
Gunilla Hermansson is associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg. Her main
research areas are Scandinavian romanticism and modernism. Her latest monograph, from a research project on
The Modernists’ Prose and Expressionism. Studies in Scandinavian Modernism 1910-1930, will be published
in 2015. Yvonne Leffler is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She
has published several studies on the nineteenth-century novel, for instance a monograph on the rise of the epistolary
Swedish novel and several articles on Swedish nineteenth-century writers, and several books and articles on
contemporary film and literature. Both are currently working on the project Swedish Women Writers on Export
in the Nineteenth Century, funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Uroš Tomić, Milan Miljković: ‘It's a Small World After All! – Reading Serbian Culture in
Translation; A Case Study’
Pascale Casanova argues that literatures constantly invest their cultural capital and available
resources into a struggle for wider recognition and dominance in the system of literary values.
This paper will investigate the various elements engaged in this struggle within Serbian and other
South Slavic literatures, translated into English for differing literary audiences in the UK and
Serbia, through case studies of two publishers (Istros books - London; Geopoetika – Belgrade).
By combining analysis of editorial practices, the cultural and literary interpretation and the
reception of translated works, we will present a new critical evaluation of the current position
and symbolic cultural capital of Serbian and South-Slavic literatures and offer new policies for
the promotion of small literatures, within the wider context of the struggles in world literature.
Uroš Tomić is a lecturer and translator at the University of Belgrade. He has published numerous academic
works as well as a novel and a collection of short stories. Milan Miljković is a researcher at the Institute for
Literature and Arts in Belgrade.
Panel Five
Olga Castro: ‘Literary Self-Translation from Galician into Spanish: Cultural
Appropriation or Political Activism?’
This paper focuses on the multilingual context of contemporary Spain and analyses the selftranslation trend from peripheral/minority literatures (i.e. Basque, Catalan, Galician) into the
central/normalized Castilian/Spanish literary system. It examines how Galician literature is
translated across borders through self-translation into Spanish. I shall first illustrate the power
struggle between the Galician-Castilian competing literary systems in today’s globalized editorial
market by exploring the sociolinguistic dimension of self-translation when practised by bilingual
authors who are self-translators between languages of disparate status in the same territory.
Secondly, I assess the implications when their works are subsequently translated into foreign
languages: is the initial text in the minorised language or the recreated self-translation into the
hegemonic language used as source text? To what extent and how often do these practices lead
to patterns of cultural appropriation or ideological resistance? How does it compare to the
translations from Galician which have not been mediated by self-translation? What is the impact
these subsequent translations into foreign languages have on the Galician, the Spanish and the
target/foreign system?
Olga Castro is Lecturer in Translation Studies and Spanish at Aston University, Birmingham. She co-authored
the monograph Feminismos (Xerais, 2013). She is currently working with María Liñeira on a special issue of
the journal Abriu: Textuality Studies on Brazil, Galicia and Portugal (forthcoming 2015) and is also coediting the volume Feminist Translation Studies (for Routledge) and Self-translation and Power (for
Palgrave Macmillan). She is vice-president of the International Association for Galician Studies (AIEG).
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Jozefina Komporaly: ‘Self-translation as Cultural Encounter: Migration and Border
Politics’
Drawing on Romanian-born and Paris-based writer Matéi Visniec, I wish to investigate what it
might mean to reach the cultural mainstream as an émigré author who self-translates, and to
examine the complexities of belonging to more than one cultural system. I challenge the notion
of cultural ownership, and explore participation in a potentially global cultural exchange. For
Visniec, switching to French has opened up access to a world-wide Francophone audience, and
facilitated becoming a household name in his native Romania. Thus, Visniec’s case is an
argument for a successful border crossing that enhances cultural encounters and indicates the
possibility of a fruitful dialogue between perceived ‘peripheries’ and the ‘centre’.
Jozefina Komporaly is a translator and research fellow at the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University,
Leicester. In 2015, she published the first English-language anthology of Matéi Visniec’s theatre, How to
Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays, with Seagull Books.
Anne O’Connor: ‘Competing Voices: Translation, Nationalism and Ireland in the
Nineteenth Century’
In the nineteenth century, Irish nationalists sought to gain currency for their ideas by claiming
that the Irish possessed a rich literary heritage distinct from an English literary tradition. This
literary heritage was written in the Irish language but in order to promote Irish-language
literature to the general populace, it needed to be translated into English. In this translation lay
one of the great paradoxes of Irish language nationalism – to make Irish literature more valued
and appreciated as a distinct element of Ireland’s unique heritage, it needed to be translated into
the ‘oppressor’s language’. This paper will examine the Anglicising of Ireland’s literary past
through translation and the impact that this move had on the Irish language. It will show how
recognition and acknowledgement of Irish literature through translation came at a cost. In a
colonial perspective, it will ask how dissemination was reconciled with vernacular trends and will
question the barriers that Irish translators faced. It will question why so many Irish nationalists
were prolific translators in the nineteenth century and whether native Irish traditions were
considered mutually compatible or mutually exclusive with European influences. It will examine
how the notions of originality, uniqueness and a distinct national voice developed in conjunction
with emerging notions of translation.
Anne O’Connor is a lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of
Ireland Galway. Her research interests include translation history, Romanticism, religious translation, as well as
nineteenth century Italian literature and history. She is the author of Florence: City and Memory in the
Nineteenth Century (Firenze: La Città e la Memoria Nell’Ottocento, 2008) and Italian editor and
translator of European Romanticism: A Reader (2010). She has also edited Nation/Nazione: Irish
Nationalism and the Italian Risorgimento (2013). She is currently Principal Investigator in the IRCfunded research project ‘Translation in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’ (www.translationhistory.ie).
Liz Wren-Owens: ‘Antonio Tabucchi: Co-opting Italian texts to the Anglophone canon’
This paper focuses on the English translations of the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi (19432012) and investigates the ways his works are presented as part of an Anglophone, or global
canon, deracinated from the Italian tradition. Domestication of the works at textual level, the
high visibility of the translators (in particular Tim Parks) and the use of paratext combine to
produce works which are hybrid documents. The translated texts produce a mediated view of
Italy from an Anglophone perspective, and insert the works into a global dialogue about the
meaning of literature, disaggregating the individual texts from Tabucchi’s work as a whole and
from the Italian tradition in which they were produced. The paper forms part of a wider book
project, Antonio Tabucchi: Translation and Intercultural Mediation.
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Liz Wren-Owens is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Italian and Translation Studies at the University of
Cardiff, UK. Her current research centres on the project Antonio Tabucchi: Translation and Intercultural
Mediation. Previous publications address memories of fascism in Italian-Scottish and Italian-Welsh narrative,
class and ethnic identity in Italian-Welsh narratives and café culture, first-wave Italian-American and AfricanItalian migrant narrative, race and ethnic identity in Italian narrative, socio-political engagement in Tabucchi and
Sciascia, postcolonial memories of Italian and Portuguese empire in Tabucchi, and detective fiction.
Panel Six
David Norris: ‘Translation, Cultural Exchange, Hospitality: Naming the Literatures of
Small European Nations’
This conference considers translation as a broad field, not only the transfer of meanings from
one linguistic system to another, but also the foreign text as the enabler of a dialogue between
cultures. The existence of less-well known languages implies the counter life of languages which
have a global reach, denied to their smaller neighbours, and whose status transforms them into
essential partners in the international flow of literary translations. The literatures of small
European nations are dependent on them to create a level of visibility which allows their
participation in the wider dialogue of cultures. All the more reason that the reception of
translations from these literatures is structured in a hospitable environment to promote cultural
exchange. Questions of language, and thus translation, are central to the cultural and political
implications of hospitality. I intend on this occasion to focus on the issue of naming. Naming is
power, because the process of giving a name to someone or something may be a gateway to
further introductions spreading recognition and visibility, or it may lead to the distribution of
false and imprisoning forms which isolate the translated other. Languages, literary traditions,
cultural identities, nations and territories are referred to by nouns and adjectives which if
misapplied confer the wrong or perhaps even a demeaning identity. Hospitality requires of those
responsible for cultural translation, whether it be the publishers of translations or critics
discussing works from less-well known languages, to give attention to the process of naming. I
shall use the examples of Serbian and Yugoslav literatures and take my discussion through three
stages:
1.
2.
3.
why naming assumes different proportions for small European nations compared to
their dominant neighbours
the complex history of naming languages and literary traditions within the literary
histories of a small nation
the effects of the failure to recognize the histories of the naming process as part of
wider political and cultural discourses.
David Norris is an associate professor in the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University
of Nottingham. His research focuses mainly on Serbian literature and culture. Among his major publications the
book In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (1999) and Belgrade:
A Cultural and Literary History (2008). He is currently preparing a monograph with the working title
Haunted Serbia: Narratives of Memory, History and War.
Ursula Phillips: Polish and European: How can translations modify standard perceptions
of Polish literature?
Polish literary studies have tended to privilege exclusive nation-specific interpretations, including
outside Poland, where émigré voices have been powerful and coloured the critical approach of
non-Poles. While this is understandable for historical reasons, it undermines the European
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inspirations and contributions of texts written in the Polish language, rendering them in the
general perception exotic and inaccessible. By translating works that do not fall into this
relatively narrow category (I will concentrate in the current presentation on four women authors
living in the 17th to 20th centuries), I wish to 1) make Polish texts more visible within the wider
fold of the European and 2) modify the canon read on university courses and by the general
public.
Ursula Phillips is an honorary research associate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London. Her research interests include Polish literary and cultural history, contemporary Polish
literature, women’s studies, gender and feminism and translation studies. She also translates both literary and
scholarly works.
Antonija Primorac: ‘“But you do misery so well!”: Cultural Stereotypes, Translation
Politics and Croatian Literature in English’
Taking the 1990s war in ex-Yugoslavia as the key historical episode in the (re-)definition of the
region’s public image in the English-speaking world, this paper aims to examine the links
between the politics of translation, publishers’ marketing strategies and the formation of cultural
stereotypes about ‘minor’ literatures and cultures, using Croatian literature as a case study. The
paper surveys chronologically and thematically the history of translations into English of
Croatian texts. The current choice of titles for translations seems to feed into the by now
established image of standard local narratives: misery, exile, and war-related topics. The paper
concludes by analysing the role of translation politics for the creation of the Anglophone version
of the Croatian ‘literary system’, and queries the translations’ relationship to the Croatian literary
mainstream.
Antonija Primorac is an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, University
of Split. Her research interests include Neo-Victorianism, adaptation studies, and links between Victorian
literature and material culture. Her publications also include work on the intertextual relations between Croatian
and English literature (2006) and on contemporary Canadian literature, including an edited anthology of
Canadian short stories translated into Croatian.